Write-up

Hii team!

6a.m is quite early for me as well XD, but I will come if that is the time we agree upon.

Also, Aly and I have posted the write-up on the engl391 gmail account. If you guys have any problems opening it up, please give Aly an email and she will send you a copy.

-Lid

6 am!

Sounds a little early! If we need that much time I suppose I could do 6 am. What about 8 am?

Aly

Sunday Morning

So how does 6am meeting sound to everyone?

Sunday meeting

Hi everyone,

I work on Sunday from noon until 8pm so the only times I am available are before and after that.

If we absolutely cannot figure out a way to make this work we can perhaps rehearse at the yoga studio where I work while classes are in session, but I would prefer if we did not have to go down that road.

:)
Aly

linguistic Hybridity?

This is not organized, it is more or less a list of quotes showing linguistic hybridity

"Much Love peeps" (quoting myself there just to check if the quotation marks are working, they are and so we begin)

"'Adieu.' Not adieu as we said it, but à dieu, which made more sense after all. The loving mang was lonely, the girl was deserted, the children never came back. Adieu." (18)

Creole |ˈkrēˌōl| (also creole)

noun

1 a person of mixed European and black descent, esp. in the Caribbean.

• a descendant of Spanish or other European settlers in the Caribbean or Central or South America.

• a white descendant of French settlers in Louisiana and other parts of the southern U.S.

2 a mother tongue formed from the contact of two languages through an earlier pidgin stage : a Portuguese-based Creole.

adjective

of or relating to a Creole or Creoles.

ORIGIN from French créole, criole, from Spanish criollo, probably from Portuguese crioulo ‘black person born in Brazil, home-born slave,’ from criar ‘to breed,’ from Latin creare ‘produce, create.’

 a touch of the hybrid can be seen in the broken manner most of the island inhabitants speak 

"I never see you do it...only talk."(21)

"She hear all we poor like beggar"(21)

"Old time white people nothing but white nigger now, and black nigger better than white nigger"(21)

 the language broken as it where by hybridity (as our favorite character would prove to be).

I have taken all these quotes from a single page, as there are hundreds of references to how the natives speak, on almost every single page, the expanse is better illustrated with a single page

this excerpt could be considered a case of the linguistic hybrid albeit one that occurred before the importation of englishman to the Caribbean

"he opened the door leading to the glacis and walked out."

glacis |ˈglāsis; ˈglas-|

noun ( pl. same or -cises)

a gently sloping bank, in particular one that slopes down from a fort, exposing attackers to the defenders' missiles.

ORIGIN late 17th cent.: from French, from Old French glacier ‘to slip,’ from glace ‘ice,’ based on Latin glacies.

interesting term to use for ones porch

"Qui est là? Qui est là?...Ché Coco, Ché Coco."

An Island bird that only speaks the singular french phrase (very suspect indeed)

"your mother walk around with no shoes and stockings on her feet, she sans culottes." 

what's interesting is that while we could infer based on context that Christophine here is referring to the lack of feet covering of Antoinette's mother (also called Antoinette) the word culottes in french today means  season, and in English Breeches. now we can't assume that Antoinette's mother was walking around bare bottomed but the litterary translation would be such (even more preposterous to be walking around without season). However if we go to the historic translation of the term 18th century england so named the lower class plebeian masses sans culottes because they did not wear the upper class breeches. that such a term of class discrimination be adopted by a colonized land is indeed peculiar, especially so being used by an islander in reference to a white colonial.

I introduce the frequent injections of patois into the scene thus:
"talking not English but the debased French patois they use in this island"

"in the street another called Bon sirop, Bon sirop, and I felt peacefull."(58)

"Doudou, ché cocotte"(61)

"They call this fashion à la josephine."(67)

"Not those. The fer de lance of course, but there are none here"(73)

"Every evening we saw the sun go down from the thatched shelter she called the ajoupa, I the summer house."

"Ma bell ka di maman li. My beautiful girl said to her mother"(76)

Speaking specifically of Antoinette, we see her throughout the novel going between english and patois, addressing Christophine in patois when in the presence of the un-named rochester.
Do note that the linguistic hybridity is not simply the bilingual or quadlingual abilities of our favorite character but rather in the way she blends the different languages (predominantly Patois & English) and moves between them. her interaction between both creating moments refusing translation.

"Adieu Foulard, Adieu Madras, or Ma belle ka di maman li. My beautiful girl said to her mother (No it is not like that. Now listen. It is this way). She'd be silent, or angry for no reason, and chatter to Christophine in patois."

We wouldn't talk about the religious hybridity, it seems like a one liner at best. there's the part at the beginning in which Antoinette's father talks about the islanders being penitent in the morning (after burning down their house) which suggest christianity, and then there's Obeah the black magic religion. we could suggest in the Islanders there is a hybrid between the christian faith and black magic (pagan) beliefs, thins being also suggested by the inset from The Glittering Coronet of Isles in which the islanders are said to refuse to talk about black magic though they believe in it.
"I have noticed that negroes as a rule refuse to discuss the black magic in which they believe"

Anything else comes to mind that I've missed?
oh yeah! Tits!

Go team!
K

Write up and Presentation Time

Alrighty, so far, for the write up, I have approximately 8-9 pages (not double spaced), and this does not include contextualization.  Since the professor reserves the last half of the class for the rest of lecture, and we are splitting the first portion of the class with another group, we have about 40min for our presentation.  That means that we will have to cover the material for each page, on average, in 4mins or so.  We may not need that much time for each page anyways, since we tend to talk faster than we can read.  I'm just wondering what everyone else thinks of this.

P.S. I will upload a new version of the write-up on the engl391 gmail account.

-Lid

Antoinette Cultural and Racial Hybridity

Hey Guys,

I think my earlier posts have quite a bit on Antoinette's racial hybridity. (Please include the ants/flowers... I really like that quote :) )

Here's a few things on her cultural (or maybe racial... kind of a grey area) hybridity:

As a daughter to former slave owners, it might have seemed natural for her family

to belong to the white community, rather than the black, but as the very opening words of the novel

suggest, they were not in their ranks due to the Cosway's Creole background. The white community

did not accept them, but neither were they welcome among their former slaves: “They hated us.

They called us white cockroaches” (Rhys 8). Antoinette finds herself in a gray zone between the

dominant blocks of power, not belonging to any of them, but instead forced to become a hybrid.

http://hig.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2:218975

Instead of crossing a physical border, and having to deal with the questions of belonging

from a traditional immigrant perspective, the Cosways are immigrants within a society, forming

their identity through the crossing from one system of power to another. Indeed they are second and

third generation immigrants, now sharing a Creole background, which is even intensifying the

questions of identity and belonging because of the difficulty they have in identifying themselves as

either white nor black. These questions were perhaps not as pressing in colonial times when the

Cosways could grow wealthy and powerful through the abuse and slavery they occupied themselves

10

with and even were dependent on. But as the social structure changed and they no longer were by

default on the top, new questions of identity arise. They were suddenly not in the white people's

ranks due to their loss of economic status, their racially mixed, and allegedly mentally unstable

background, but neither were they in the favor of their former slaves. It is this crossing from one

system to another that changes the way they perceive their identity, and also changes the way they

are seen by others. (10)

^^ This except also comes from the essay in the above link.

Antoinette's relationships are severly affected by her unclear identity. She can't seem to connect fully with anyone because she is an 'other' to everyone. If anyone let's Antoinette get too close to them, they risk confusion of their own identity. Perhaps this is why Rochester refuses to emotionally connect with Antoinette. If he let's her in, he might risk the integrity of his 'Englishness'. From a cultural perspective, a lack of relationships leaves Antoinette completely alone. We shape our cultural identity by observing and learning from those around us. Since Antoinette doesn't have this option, she ends up in-between cultures, but more importantly, she ends up alone.

At one point, Tia says to Antoinette,

'That's not what she hear, she said. She hear all we poor like beggar. We ate salt fish – no

money for fresh fish. That old house so leaky, you run with calabash to catch water when it

rain. Plenty white people in Jamaica. Real white people, they got gold money. They didn't look at

us, nobody see them come near us. Old time white people nothing but white nigger now, and

black nigger better than white nigger'. (Rhys 9)
When reading this passage, one must remember that Antoinette is the narrator. She is recreating this scene for the reader. She doesn't argue or oppose Tia's comment. Instead, she recounts it in third person for the reader. This suggests that Antoinette has internalized her identity as a 'white cockroach'.

The next quotation I'm going to post is pretty long but it's got really good content about Antoinette's attempt to dress like an English lady:

Antoinette tries to please Edward by acting as English and as appealing to him as she

possibly can, her view of the woman he would desire, but in many cases her efforts are interpreted

as the opposite: when she tries to behave like an English lady, Edward only sees the untidy

blackness in her, reassuring him of his suspicions that she is nothing like him. Mardorossian

discusses a scene in the novel where Antoinette tries to simulate a girl from a painting she was very

fond of when she was young, “The Miller's Daughter”. The painting represents a “lovely English

girl with brown curls and blue eyes and a dress slipping off her shoulders” (Rhys 19). This image

Antoinette seems to remember when she later tries to win her husband's heart, Mardorossian argues.

To Antoinette, “The Miller's Daughter” is a representation of how an English woman should look

and be, one of the few clues she has on how to appeal to Edward, but instead of appealing to

Edward he now finds her even stranger and pushes her further away: “She was wearing the white

dress I had admired, but it had slipped untidily over one shoulder and seemed too large for her. I

watched her holding her left wrist with her right hand, an annoying habit” (Rhys 97). Mardorossian

summarizes: “Antoinette herself is incapable of realizing that in Rochester's eyes, her attire actually

associates her with (black) female wantonness and prostitution” (Mardorossian 1076). When

Edward is faced with the problem of his wife not living up to the standard of his view of an English

woman, he chooses to push her aside as an other and also remarks on her annoying habit of holding

her wrist with her hand. (17-18) _The essay above

I know this post has just been a lot of quotes... but I don't have time to keep working on this :( I think I'm going to leave my part (of the research) at this and pass over the ball.

Literary Hybridity is just a matter of looking at that essay I posted earlier on the blog.

Cheers Guys! I'm looking forward to writing our skits on Saturday! Let's also decide on a time for our meeting on Sunday. I work at 4 p.m.

Martyna G